A ray of thankfulness shone across her features.
"Marriage! I don't know, Sir Denis; but, if you love her I can tell you something that will help you to understand her better, and perhaps you can help her."
Briefly, and in broken words, she related to him the strange incident of Rosanne's babyhood, its seeming effect upon her character, and the Malay's extraordinary words of two days before. She did not disguise from him that she believed Rosanne guilty, whether consciously or unconsciously, of many dark things, but she pleaded for her child the certainty that she had been in the clutches of forces stronger than herself.
"About the diamonds," she finished, at last, "I know nothing, and I am afraid to think. Did you read of that awful case of suicide in yesterday's paper—that man, Syke Ravenal, who has been robbing De Beers? I am tormented with the thought that she may have known something of him—yet how could she?"
"You must put such a thought out of your mind for ever and never mention it to a soul," said Harlenden firmly. "That man committed suicide because his only son had been killed by accident in Amsterdam. He left a vast fortune and a number of jewels which had been taken from their settings to De Beers, by way of conscience-money for several thousand pounds' worth of diamonds in the rough which he had stolen from them. There is absolutely no evidence to connect any other person with his crime, except a letter asking the company to deal lightly with a native boy called Hiangeli, who had been a tool of his."
"Then you think it could have nothing possibly to do with my poor child?"
"Certainly not," said Denis Harlenden, without flinching.
"Not that I think that she would have done it in her right senses, but, oh, Sir Denis, she has been under a spell all her life, an evil spell, which, please God, will be broken when that woman dies! You do not think me mad, I hope?"
"I do not," he answered gravely. "I am as sure of what you say as you yourself. What you do not know, Mrs. Ozanne, is that love has already broken that spell. Rosanne is already free from it."
She looked at him questioningly, longingly.